Obama's Patience Policies

When I first got this email, my instincts told me it was a fake. Then I started getting it from Navy folks who believed it was real. So I began investigating. Bill Gertz got a copy of the email too and did a follow up, and now we have extra information regarding the Maersk Alabama incident.

Among the reports disputed by Pentagon officials was a widely circulated Internet critique - purportedly from an anonymous source close to the SEAL community - saying Navy SEALs missed a chance to shoot the pirates on April 10 when Richard Phillips, the captain of the hijacked freighter, jumped out of a lifeboat where he was being held in a failed escape attempt.

However, military officials at the Pentagon involved in the operation said Navy SEAL snipers had not arrived on board the Bainbridge at that time and therefore could not have fired on the pirates.

This was the one detail I could never get confirmed, because from my accounting of the time line as described in the reporting, this did not add up.

I will say one thing though. As I read the Bill Gertz report and read the email, I don't think Bill Gertz debunks the details so much as debunks the partisan, clearly biased slant. Based on perspective, the details as described in the email don't really get debunked, although the presentation clearly gets debunked.

For example:

1. Bill Gertz confirms it did take a long time for the SEALs to arrive, but the email falsely blames Obama for this.
2. The RoE was more restrictive, but as Bill Gertz points out this direction came from CENTCOM "because the Navy regarded the operation as countering criminal activity, namely piracy."
3. It is true that when the navy RIB came under fire as it approached with supplies, no fire was returned due to ROE restrictions. Whether the SEALs had all of the pirates on target or not appears to be an assumption.
4. It is unclear if two rescue plans were denied, but if they were denied, the denial would have come from CENTCOM, while the email falsely blames the President. Based on the situation details that have been made public, clearly time was on the side of the Navy. I don't think denying a rescue attempt or two, if it happened, would have been a bad decision even if the email frames it as one.
5. All indications from the beginning have suggested Bainbridge CDR had OpArea and OSC authority. The email acts like every report, including Bill Gertz's report, somehow suggests this is untrue. What is more probable is that the onscene CDR was not rushing to take action unless absolutely necessary, and that was frustrating someone who felt like patience wasn't a good thing.
6. The "credit" does go to everyone involved, including the President. This point in the email was nothing more than partisan snark and contained no events related to the action.
   

The email ultimately became a widely dispersed anti-Obama propaganda piece, but when evaluating the specific facts applied and ignoring all the partisan opinion, I don't see the email as debunked per se, rather poorly directed blame for what amounts to an inaccurate opinion on the entire episode, with only one fact that was completely inaccurate.

The way I see it, there are two important lessons here.

1. The Navy does not get involved in action at sea very often, and when something does happen, it would appear that people want to talk about (and will give an opinionated slant as part of unofficial accounting). There is going to be a lot of chaff in these early reports, and people need to be skeptical of early reports, particularly when they are completely absent credibility.
2. There is a tendency to attach a political view to any military event in the current hyper partisan environment, but the truth is, anyone who has been around military folks conducting their business knows hyper partisanship is never present. That isn't to say that military folks don't have a political opinion, only that you never see it influence their work. It just isn't part of the professional environment.

Finally, by every measure this paragraph appears to be the bottom line regarding the incident.

"This was, from my perspective, a textbook operation," Mr. Jones said in the interview. "There were two things [the president] was asked to approve and he did. And the military executed flawlessly."

I agree completely. The Barack Obama administration has developed an early pattern of patience when dealing with very complicated foreign policy and military problems. We have seen this with Iraq pullout, with the Afghanistan troop reinforcement, with the Iran nuclear day, with the North Korean missile launch, with the Impeccable incident, and finally with the Somali piracy incident. The Presidents political opponents are touting patience as indecision.

All indications to date suggest the presidents political opponents are inaccurate, and in the belief that time does not gain any advantage, are encouraging action to create a perception of inaction by the President. The problem with that strategy is we have seen action. The Iraq pullout was ultimately announced. The Afghanistan troop reinforcement has been committed to even as the strategy is under review. There was no panic with the Chinese, and this week has been very good for US-China relations due to ADM Roughead's leadership.

We don't know what will happen yet regarding North Korea or Iran, so we will have to wait and see. As far as the Somali piracy incident, patience clearly paid off.